“That I can’t explain just now. But though I can’t take the job, I’ll do all I can in a personal way to help handle that condition you were speaking about. You’ll excuse me, Chief, but I’ve got to do a lot of quick thinking.”

Leaving Thorne fairly gasping at this swift transition, Clifford strode out of the office and out of Police Headquarters. Two minutes later he was in a telephone booth in a saloon across the way and was asking the Grantham Hotel, in which he had left Mary Regan an hour before, for “Mrs. Gardner.” Soon Mary’s cool, even voice sounded over the wire.

“This is Robert Clifford,” he said. “May I see you again—for just a few minutes?”

There was a long silence; then the cool voice queried: “Alone?”

“If you please.”

Another silence. He was beginning to fear that she had hung up, when the cool voice spoke again.

“Very well”—and this time he heard the receiver click upon its hook.

He hurried for the Subway. He was athrill with a grim elation. He felt that all that had thus far passed between him and Mary Regan was no more than a prelude—a long prelude, to be sure—and that the big action of their drama lay still before[54] them. He would fight on, still, for Mary Regan—to save her from herself, to protect her from others!

[54]

But in this, his high moment, he had no prevision of the vagaries of a woman’s nature he was to encounter—of a willful, many-elemented woman who had not yet found herself, and who had a long road yet to travel before she reached that self-knowledge; and he had no prevision of the strange places behind the scenes of pleasure that his new purpose was to cause him to penetrate, and no prevision of the strange motives, the strange mixtures of human nature, that he was to meet.

[55]

CHAPTER VI MARY SHOWS HER HAND

Mary Regan stood in the dusk of her sitting-room, holding apart the velvet hangings of a window, and gazing far down at the quadruple line of motorcars which at this twilight winter hour moves in slow lockstep between Thirty-third and Fifty-ninth Streets; and as she vacantly gazed upon the 

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